This week in Russian Weird: how the whole country was influenced by an American soap opera. (I watched "Santa Barbara" for two years in the mid-80s, but solely because I was crazy in love with Lane Davies. Had little use for the show otherwise. Considering how SB got such consistently low ratings in the U.S., it's fascinating how it became such a cultural phenomenon overseas.)

2 comments:

(1) On the vaudeville countess: I totally agree with her that you should live to be 150, because the first 50 years are wasted in learning how to live.

(2) On soap operas: I never watched "Santa Barbara," but I did watch "General Hospital" one summer (must have been around 1980), back when Luke had his eye-patch. Horrible things, soap operas. Anyway, what struck me most in later life was how much the horrible "Heather" character reminded me of that radio actress who played almost every bad girl on shows like "The Whistler" or "Philip Marlowe" back in the 1940s. (Sorry, can't remember the actual names of the actresses.) I guess some things don't change.

(3) On Napoleon vs. the bugs: I always knew Buffy was right (in the original movie, "Buffy the Vampire-Slayer," not to be confused with the television series), when Buffy named "bugs" as the major problem facing our world today, and was laughed at as shallow by all the little pseudo-intellectuals at her high school. Sometimes, you just gotta go with your gut feeling. :)

The story on the 'letter that revealed a murder' didn't conclude with the arrested man's hanging but I think we may conclude the story that way ourselves. Some murderers just don't do much to cover their tracks, do they?

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